gilesbowkett.blogspot.com Archives - 26 November 2012, Monday

I had a random thought the other day: I actually did write it. You can buy it if you want. The funny thing is I wasn't actually serious when I tweeted that. The "I should write that" part was really just a knee-jerk reaction. Whenever I'm complaining about the non-availability of some...

"We built it, and that drew an audience, so we'll monetize the audience, even though it'll drive them away. The audience is big enough that we can probably make a little money before the whole thing falls apart, and if we're lucky, we might be able to sell the company to somebody who ...

Here's an easy way to write better blog posts. First write out your idea, without concern for quality. Just express the thought at hand. Next go through the text, eliminating the passive voice anywhere you find it. Do it again for adverbs , and a third time for run-on sentences . Maki...

The biggest problem with Markdown: John Gruber. ...the fact that there has been no improvement whatsoever to the specification or reference implementation for five years is kind of a problem. There are some fairly severe bugs in that now-ancient 2004 Markdown 1.0.1 Perl implementation...

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Undoubtedly overkill, but the time for sacrificing basic usability to personal cleverness was the 1990s, when the Web was new and its user experience fundamentals were unknown enough to justify experimenting. Breaking the back button two decades later is just shameful, especially now ...

A Downside To Curated "Journalism" A Refactoring Opportunity Within Rails 3 The Dark Side Of Trolling Why Does Twitter Suck? Believe It Or Not, It's The... When Pixar Makes A Horror Movie, The World Will Be... You Fuckers Are Adorable I Think This Would Be Better Stylization And Abbre...

Apologies to the entire open source community, because I'm raising this on my blog rather than participating in the open source development process around Rails, especially since it's entirely possible this is already fixed in Rails 4. However, I've often gotten the impression that sp...

MAY CHEER AND GOOD FORTUNE BE HEAPED DEEPLY UPON YOU THIS MORN! THE WENCHES AND GOOD MEAD OF THE BYGONE EVE STILL HANG THICKLY UPON ME! WHAT GOOD FORTUNE THAT I MAY WAKE TO 512 MOAR MEGA BYTES OF YOUR RAM IN MY GHOSTLY VIRTUAL COMPUTING DEVICE!

As a hacker who also wants to be a filmmaker and musician, my life takes some weird twists and turns. I kicked some entrepreneurial ass in 2010, but returned to hacking for hourly rates in 2011. Here's why: I took a job that didn't pay very well because I got to work with a very accom...

SynthBot is an unsupervised programmer for software synthesizers. It takes as input a target sound ﬁle and a software synthesizer, and returns the set of parameters for the synthesizer which produce as similar a sound to the target as possible. [Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefﬁcient]s are...

I advertise this in my blog sidebar, and blogged it once or twice: I've run into a couple misconceptions here and there on Twitter, etc., so I'm going to blog this quick FAQ. It's more a "frequently mistaken assumptions," then a true FAQ, though. First of all, I didn't write it. It wa...

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Wrap function definitions in wrapper functions Identify similar JavaScript code blocks Calculate similarity percentage between any two code blocks Compare code blocks to see how many specific tokens they differ by Extract the variant tokens by which similar code blocks differ Extract ...

Everybody loves the way you can just git push origin master in a Heroku project and see your changes live on the web right away. If you're on EC2, Slicehost, or any other non-Heroku environment, it's exceptionally easy to hack that functionality into your own project. This is literall...

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If you don't fuck around with iMovie's ridiculous "projects" horseshit, and you just want to get your shit from a camcorder and onto your Mac, use iMovie to import the video, and then just quit out of that useless piece of fucking garbage and go to the "iMovie Events" folder on whiche...

I think listening to Node.js hype at all is foolish. It's just not worth having an opinion about. It leads to a foolish brattiness in those who believe it and an equally foolish hostility in those who harp on its flaws. Hype is hype. It's bullshit. Let it go. Node will change course t...

lost an argument with me on GitHub ranted about it on his blog: Giles... bemoans bundler, because typing "bundle exec" represents ceremony, and using any of the myriad solutions to avoid typing "bundle exec", such as bundler binstubs or rvm gemsets, represents configuration which viol...

I don't know why this band doesn't have ads on this video, but if they did, YouTube would be paying them every single time somebody saw it. As it is, iTunes is paying them every time somebody buys their song -- which still puts them ahead of nearly everybody who's dealt with the enter...

with Loren Segal. Realized why I was right when I revisited TomDoc and took a look at how it handles the public/private distinction. # Public: Duplicate some text an arbitrary number of times. # # text - The String to be duplicated. # count - The Integer number of times to duplicate t...

, my new class where I teach music hacking, and use music hacking to also teach Node.js, CoffeeScript, Backbone, Socket.io, command-line JavaScript TDD, and related tech. You'll learn how to do this: And this: And even this: It's $212 for 3 months of biweekly videos and biweekly chats...

is a gentle introduction to command-line TDD in JavaScript. You can see it here in Flash format: You can also download it: episode2.m4v (for iOS, OS X, and Apple TV) I'm going to build a class on videos like this. The class itself consists of biweekly videos. The first video was 35 mi...

I sometimes think that Silicon Valley is this weird abstract hunting ground where Neo-Victorian aristocrats hunt and kill good ideas for sport, the same way their ancestors would have killed foxes. It's really hard to explain project managers and technology executives without postulat...

I recently figured out how to use Socket.io and Node.js to control the speed of a CSS3 animation with a synthesizer: I also got CoffeeScript playing drums for me with very little effort: You can do this too. I've started a new video series called Teaching The Robots To Sing , where I ...

Of course, I have to balance these hard-sell tactics with some plain speaking. This was not a straight meteoric rise, and the sad truth is I'm not just teaching you what I learned from success, but what I've learned from failure as well. I've done a few small gigs for tiny pay, and ag...

We use a bizarre, convoluted mechanism for attaching ClassMethods and InstanceMethods modules to ActiveRecord::Base because if we attempt to subclass it in a gem, we don't get a subclass in the purest sense. What we actually get is a new class which ActiveRecord::Base creates. ActiveR...

A few days ago I added a regex to the code which generates Hacker Newspaper : Unfortunately, a YC job ad made it past this filter almost instantly: (If you're wondering why the comments page looks different: omgwtfhax .) I felt tricked. I also felt the tactic was a little sleazy and d...

Secrets Of Superstar Programmer Productivity: Flow Referenced in the video: Great Hackers by Paul Graham Hitting The High Notes by Joel Spolsky Some notes on productivity from futurepundit.com Update Conventional wisdom advocates checking your e-mail every five minutes - or worse yet,...